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Bob Iger, Josh Kushner to Buy Lakers in Record $12.5 Billion Deal

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Former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner are set to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for more than $12 billion, a record price for a professional sports franchise, ESPN reported Wednesday.

“As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Iger and Kushner said in a joint statement. “Our long-term commitment is to build on that foundation, compete at the highest level, and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles.”

The pair will acquire the Lakers from Mark Walter, who became the team’s majority owner last year.

The deal marks the second time the Lakers have changed hands in less than a year. The NBA approved Walter’s purchase of a majority interest from the Buss family last October in a deal that valued the franchise at $10 billion. Jeanie Buss remained the Lakers’ governor following the sale.

“Owning the Los Angeles Lakers has been one of the great honors of my life — an extraordinary investment, but what I will carry with me is the community, the fans, and a city that treats this team as family,” Walter said in a statement. “The Lakers belong to Los Angeles, and I have every confidence the best is still ahead.”

Iger stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and subsequently returned to Kushner’s Thrive in an advisory role. He previously served as a venture partner at the firm between his two stints leading Disney.

Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, also acquired a controlling stake in Angel City FC in 2024, giving the former Disney chief an existing foothold in Los Angeles professional sports.

Iger and Kushner had also been eyeing a bid for a potential NBA expansion team in Las Vegas, TheWrap previously reported. The pair had been working with investment bankers on a potential offer through Thrive Eternal, a holding company established by Thrive Capital, before pivoting to the Lakers, according to ESPN.

Kushner founded Thrive Capital in 2009 and is also the co-founder and vice chairman of health insurer Oscar Health.

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‘The Wrong Girls’ Review: Get Blazed With Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat

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Every great stoner movie is about what you’d be doing right now if you weren’t stoned. Or at least what you’d be doing if you were stoned and willing to leave the house. Classic films like “The Big Lebowski,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and various Cheech and/or Chong adventures depict the world as an absurdly eventful place where little problems quickly transform into epic adventures, and the only way to save the day is to get even more zonked.

Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls” is probably a new stoner classic. I don’t know, I haven’t watched it while high yet, but I suspect it’s been performance-tested under those optimal conditions. (Kids? Leave serious film criticism to the professionals; don’t try this at home.) It’s a profoundly ridiculous movie where anything can happen if it’s funny, starring two top flight actors who are eager to embrace the absurd.

Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are Frankie and Molly, two potheads who live with their cats GG and Dio and are pretty sure they solved climate change while they were wasted the other night. Frankie dropped out of an ivy league college and now she uses her engineering genius to build Rube Goldberg super bongs. Molly is an incredible chef with a boyfriend Frankie hates, because he wants to move in with Molly and Frankie fears change. She’s also afraid of success and afraid her ex-boyfriend is moving on with a girl who looks just like her, also played by Kristen Stewart.

Frankie is in no danger of success, but Molly moving out and her boyfriend moving on with a lookalike? That’s actually happening. But then, in a twist right out of “North By Northwest” (but 30% wackier), Frankie comes into possession of a mysterious package, delivered by a mercenary whose name she can’t remember. All she knows is he’s not a metal head so she calls him Not Metal Head Dave (LaKeith Stanfield). The package has a bunch of glowing super drugs inside and, since Frankie and Molly can’t make rent, they decide to sell this secret stash. But they don’t know what it does so they dilute a small amount in water and test it out, extremely carefully.

Just kidding. They shotgun it. Their cats even lick some off the floor, which in real life would be a bad thing (just like shotgunning bottles of unknown pharmaceuticals). But in “The Wrong Girls,” it means they all get psychic powers. Now they can read each other’s minds — GG and Dio sound just like Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen (what are the odds?) — and they’re pretty sure they can move solid objects. Sometimes. Maybe. If weed is involved.

Now they’re at the center of an international conspiracy between foreign nationals, mad scientists, the FBI and a cabal of European assassins. And to think, all this might have happened to you if you’d simply left the house instead of watching Gregg Araki’s “Smiley Face” again while getting toasted.

“The Wrong Girls” is 100% nonsense and that’s what makes it perfect. Well, perfect for a stoner comedy. Every silly thing that could possibly happen must, inevitably, happen. Fortunately for all of us, Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are in almost every scene, slaying the nonsensical dialogue and gesticulating wildly at the slightest provocation. Stewart seems particularly liberated by this chance to go full clown-mode — almost everything she says or does is amusing, adorable or slightly annoying but in an adorably amusing way.

That’s the other thing about stoner movies: They don’t work if the audience wouldn’t want to smoke out with the protagonists. Stewart and Shawkat make a compelling case that they belong in any blunt rotation. They’re comic dynamos with grumpy pet cats, a pocketful of weed brownies (secret ingredient: blue cheese) and an extremely sensible obsession with Céline Dion. If you don’t love Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat in “The Wrong Girls,” you probably don’t know what love is. Or maybe you just have different taste in stoner comedies. I guess anything’s possible.

Smart filmmakers make the best stupid comedies, and Dylan Meyer is a smart filmmaker. “The Wrong Girls” always looks like it’s veering out of control but Meyer knows where she’s going and how to get us there. She also knows we’re probably high as hell and we want to take the scenic route. So off we all pop on this wild, wild trip, with wonderful characters, a goofy sense of humor and what the heck, a psychic dance number. Fun Fact: You could improve literally any movie with a psychic dance number, but most filmmakers are too cowardly to try.

The ball’s in your court [picks random Oscar-nominated director out of a hat] … Denis Villeneuve. Go on. I dare you.

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Jenna Ortega on Early Acting Mistake: Not Drinking, Eating On Set

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Jenna Ortega is reflecting on the focus she had beginning her career as a child actor and the early mistake she made.

During a sit-down with Esquire, the Wednesday actress was asked what “rookie mistake” she made while working on her first set.

“I really had it going for me as a child ‘cause I can’t think of one mistake I made,” Ortega said. “Is that a terrible thing to say? I feel like I make mistakes now all the time, but as a child, I was so grateful and so excited to be there that my game face was on.”

She went on to recall how she was so focused that she didn’t want to inconvenience anyone by asking for even food or water.

“I wasn’t asking for one sip of water,” Ortega said. “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”

“Maybe that was my mistake, was not actually looking after myself,” she then added.

Earlier in the interview, Ortega recalled deciding to be an actor professionally when she was 7 years old.

She added, “My parents laughed at me when I told them that I wanted to do it, and then that was kind of the root of everything. The motivation. And I never really stopped, because I’m very stubborn. And then I never questioned it.”

Ortega credited Dakota Fanning for being an early creative influence on her and someone who taught her “what acting was” when she was a kid.

When also asked to set the record straight on a stereotype for child actors, she quipped, “Is it wrong to say that a lot of them are true? And do with that what you will.”

In April, Ortega also reflected on almost walking away from acting. During an appearance on pal Kid Cudi’s podcast, Big Bro, the actress revealed that she was about to start high school when she felt like “it was a good run.“ However, things changed when she booked the show, You. “We had talked about it for a few months with my team, and then, I think I booked that show You, and then I went on that set, and I loved it and had the best time,” Ortega said about the Netflix series starring Penn Badgley. “I thought, ‘Yeah, there’s no way I could let this go.’”

Ortega’s early credits included CSI: NY, Know It All NinaRichie Rich and Stuck in the Middle, as well as a film role in Iron Man 3. She later portrayed the younger version of Jane on Jane the Virgin in 2014.

The actress is next set to star in Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel.

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‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Review: Looney Tunes’ Clever Live-Action Comedy

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It’s quite funny that Dave Green‘s sweet and smart — and previously embattled — “Coyote vs. Acme” is about a scrappy group of underdogs (and undercartoons) taking on deep-pocketed baddies who don’t care about actual quality so much as lots of money. Well, it’s funny when you remember said embattlement, as the live-action Looney Tunes movie was previously made by the Tunes’ forever home, Warner Bros., before being unceremoniously dumped for a tax write-off and eventually saved by Ketchup Entertainment, who are finally releasing it after this years-long mishegoss. It’s just funny! Ironic, really!

But, frankly, it’s also a bit sad, because the truth is: the film is good. Clever and snappy, fresh and silly, a winning combination of classic Looney Tunes gags and contemporary concerns (the press notes mention many influences including, no joke, “The Insider”). That Warner Bros. didn’t believe in this is downright depressing, and that it didn’t occur to the book-cooking brass that its very plotline would inevitably draw all kinds of awkward comparisons is even worse. Fortunately, Green’s film exists — and was not thrown into a little black hole by a bunch of accountants, never to be seen again — and can surely help cure any of the pain its backstory still inflicts on movie fans and Tunes geeks.

Based partially on a New Yorker article from 1990 (a satirical one, it’s important to note, mostly because I heard someone say something about the credit at the conclusion of my screening in just such a way that it made me think they believed it was, like, a legal longread?) and scripted by Samy Burch (with story-by credits to, and this is important to note, current WB muckety muck James Gunn and “Fantastic Four” writer Jeremy Slater), the film’s logline is right there in the title. Imagine if Wile E. Coyote, sick to death of never catching his precious Road Runner because the Acme products he used to capture the fleet-footed feathered fowl are so wildly unreliable, sued their maker. Genius.

The film opens in 1992, when Dr. Peter Lorre (a classic Looney Tunes character, iconically modeled off the actual Peter Lorre), here rendered a bit of a sweet soul, attempts some sort of jailbreak from the obviously evil Acme factory where he works. (Many of the human characters in the film are named after key Looney Tunes luminaries, just look at the law firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese.) The good doctor’s escape doesn’t go so well, but it does release into the world a box of clues that, of course, will turn up much later.

Thirty years later, in fact! That’s when we catch up with Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, zipping their way around the American Southwest in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Er, coyote and road runner. Coyote’s plans to capture and kill his bird nemesis have never worked out (the film occasionally adds in vintage Looney Tunes footage, always welcome), and it’s really wearing on him. He’s kind of, well, he’s kind of sad! And for a role that doesn’t speak (he communicates via sign and facial expression), that kind of pathos is hard won. A new plan takes shape: he’ll sue Acme.

'Coyote vs. Acme'
‘Coyote vs. Acme’Ketchup Entertainment

Coyote is influenced by the siren song of veritable ambulance-chasing lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte, being characteristically very funny and exceedingly hangdog), who specializes in small claims against Acme. More like small potatoes. Kevin, who we later learn went to Harvard Law and is thus no slouch, has given up on really striving in his career. Trying and failing? Not for him! Not trying and thus not failing? Sounds good! As such, most of Kevin’s cases (which he picks up via bad commercials and worse billboards, “Better Call Saul” fans will surely love that the film is set in Albuquerque, apparently a haven for cheapo lawyers) are the kind he settles well before trial. Acme? They love to fork over peanuts for claims against their shoddy products.

But Wile E. Coyote doesn’t want peanuts.

His quest, which may have some ulterior motivations, sends Kevin, his niece Paige (Lana Condor), and the rest of the firm on a collision course with Big Acme, including its very big lead attorney, Buddy Crane (a committed John Cena). Along the way, Coyote, Kevin, and Paige follow a dizzying number of clues, the kind that inevitably add beloved icons like Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Elmer Fuud, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester the Cat, and more into the fray. Just guess who turns up at a local carrot festival.

The film’s mix of live-action and animated action is quite sophisticated — puppeteer Dave Barclay played Wile E. Coyote on set in specially made costumes that included interchangeable limbs and facial expressions, while the other ‘toons are a mix of 2D and 3D animation — and help sell a world in which humans and cartoons live alongside each other. (No, the rules of the world are not ever really explained, and perpetual reminders that cartoons can’t feel pain is undercut by the very real consequences their antics cause the human and ‘toon world.)

Seeing the Tunes out in the world is, however, a delight, one that doesn’t wear out its welcome (more, we demand). Little sight gags occur in the live-action world too, including costuming choices that see Cena’s character sporting giant bolo ties and P.J. Byrne’s sycophantic hanger-on wearing just slightly smaller versions, and it’s always fun to watch Kevin fall victim to Coyote’s many hare-brained schemes. The details of how this all melds might be fuzzy, but the final product is not.

The eventual bridging of Dr. Lorre’s fate and what Coyote and Kevin are fighting for does get a bit muddled, and the film’s final act falters in ways that only highlight how zippy (meep meep) its first hour is, but “Coyote vs. Acme” mostly works, and works well. It’s not just deserving of being not shelved for eye-rolling financial reasons, but seen and really appreciated. In the case of Hollywood’s wacky war on original ideas, we’re all lucky this one didn’t just accept “that’s all, folks!” as a fate, instead of taking it for the kind of challenge only the wiliest of characters could win.

Grade: B

Ketchup Entertainment will release “Coyote vs. Acme” in theaters on Friday, August 28.

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